15,000 Jews in Czernowitz Believed Saved by Russian Army from Retreating Germans

Of the 50,000 Jews who lived in Czernowitz before the war, about 15,000 may have been saved by the Russian Army which re-captured that Rumanian city last week, it was reported today by Jewish refugees from Rumania who arrived in Haifa last night, having left Czernowitz on March 21, nine days before the Russians drove the German armies out of the city.

The refugees, most of whom were confined in a labor camp near Czernowitz, also expressed the belief that many of the 75,000 Jews deported to Transnistria are still alive, since the Germans retreated so hastily that it is unlikely that they were able to carry out any large scale massacres.

Some 3,000 Jews in a “Trans-Bug” labor camp under German supervision were less fortunate, the refugees said. All of these, including aged persons and children, are reported to have been executed a few weeks before the Nazis retreated across the Bug River.

Most of the 240 refugees who arrived yesterday were in the labor camp near Czernowitz for the past 16 months. They said that the Rumanian attitude towards Jews had become friendlier in recent months, almost in direct proportion to the speed of the advancing Red Army. Early this year Jews were allowed to remove the yellow star which they had been forced to wear.

Among the arrivals – 208 of whom came from Czernowits and 32 from Bucharest – are the widow and child of the late Chief Rabbi Mark of Czernowitz who was killed by the Nazis in 1942. The refugees, after escaping from the camp, travelled to Bucharest and from there to the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Varna, where they embarked for Turkey.